CRMCulture Productivity Pack Puts Pivotal on Steroids

CRMCulture's Pivotal Productivity Pack is all about getting the most value out of a good thing. The features in the productivity pack are designed to enhance Pivotal's integration bona fides. Among other things, the application lets users Auto-Complete, Summarize a Column or Share a Shortcut -- all without special configuration.

CRMCulture is preparing to release its latest iteration of Productivity Pack for Pivotal CRM.

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On one hand, it might seem counterintuitive that Pivotal would need a productivity pack.

"Pivotal is a great platform," Steve Roch, CRMCulture's founder and president, told CRM Buyer. "It is pure .Net on the front and back end."

Pivotal is so powerful that most shops are able to do their own customization and configuration with little effort, he explained, "so there has not been a strong market for Pivotal add-on modules."

On the other hand, the productivity pack plays to Pivotal's customization strengths and enhances its capabilities further, Roch said.

A Brief History of Pivotal

Pivotal was once a standalone CRM app that was acquired by CDC Software, which is now Aptean.

Roch was a customer of Pivotal. He purchased it for his company when he was CIO at the former ITT, now ITT Exelis. Roch launched CRMCulture in 2007 but at the beginning focused on Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

"In 2009, I came back to Pivotal when they came out with 6.0," he said. "I felt that leapfrogged the challenges I was having with Dynamics CRM."

CRMCulture began working on the first productivity pack in late 2010, which it productized the following year. Since then, it has developed a support apparatus. The latest version, 4.0, will launch in May. Much has changed in the interim -- especially in the last five months, Roch said. "In recent months, we have signed on some of the bigger Pivotal customers -- the 1,000-plus seaters."

Hyper-Customization Capabilities

The features in the productivity pack are designed to enhance Pivotal's integration bona fides.

One company uses the productivity pack to eliminate the volume of batch editing it was doing whenever there was a change made to the company's territories. Without the productivity pack, "the company had to make programming changes," Roch said.

Another feature makes it easier for a company to implement a preview pane, he noted. "Using it, a company can preview any record and configure it without any programming at all."

This feature could save a company a lot of time and effort, said Roch. "The preview pane can show hundreds of contacts within a few minutes. Instead of opening each contact with one or more clicks, the user can just view the record. For us, productivity is all about saving users clicks."

Erika Morphy has been writing about technology, finance and business issues for more than 20 years. She lives in Silver Spring, Md.